


The Modern Man

by charcoane



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:26:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23340169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charcoane/pseuds/charcoane
Summary: Steve rolls his disheveled head and his bloodshot, alarmingly vacant eyes towards Sam and says, "At least tell me he's not dead," and Sam doesn't know how to break it to him that Stark being dead might actually be the more favorable alternative to whatever the hellthisis.
Relationships: Steve Rogers & Sam Wilson, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 15
Kudos: 240





	The Modern Man

**Author's Note:**

> The first dozen or so paragraphs were written in 2017.

Sam’s hearing engages first. He comes to in intervals, shrugs off layers of sleep slowly, fitfully. A wail seeps through the fugue, fills all that empty, dense space of blissful non-existence, and the sound of it plucks at Sam’s nerves, chases a teeth-rattling shiver down his spine. A hard jab into Sam’s hip knocks loose the last couple layers of sleep, jolts him onto his knees and elbows, and by the time he makes out the dark shape that’s fallen out of bed and making all sorts of pitiful and disturbing animals noises, he’s already fumbling for the light switch. 

“Steve?” Sam demands, and when he peers warily over the bed, it’s with the instinctual, bone-deep dread of burning a terrible, gut-turning memory into his brain. But there’s no blood, no outwards-turned flesh to reveal the innards within — it’s just Steve, curled into himself and shaking like a newborn foal. Sam calls out to him again, this time a good deal more delicately, and Steve’s answer comes in the form of an actual _keen_ , his whole body curving in and muffling the sound. 

“Good Christ,” Sam spits, adrenaline duping him into rounding the bed instead of vaulting over it, and then he’s by Steve’s side, digging his heels in and rolling him over, saying “Steve,” and _“What the hell is going on?”_

“He broke it,” Steve heaves out on a wet, fractured gasp, like he'd been socked in the gut. Sam cards Steve’s hair back to reveal his face, and it’s a shock, knocks Sam breathless and silent, as though he’d been doused with a bucket of ice water. Because it’s like looking at a stranger: Steve’s eyes are narrowed down to those similar chips of blue that Sam could recognize from miles away, but right now they’re swamped with tears and quietly pleading; his cheeks are damp and bloated and flushed, fever hot underneath Sam’s fingers. Sam wipes at Steve’s face — mindlessly, incessantly — but it’s no use: smothering isn’t going to staunch this flow.

* * *

Steve’s taken him to see “Pegs” once, back Before — before everything went to shit and they'd become self-exiles. Sam had asked, “Are you sure, man,” trailing Steve through curved, taupe-colored corridors and past a pocket-sized white lady who shot them a gap-toothed grin, and then he’d pulled up with one foot hovering just above the threshold, eyeing all that gleaming dark oak wood beyond, wondering if he should ditch the shoes.

Sam feels the same awful mix of awkward and out of place now as he’d felt back then, walking into the lovingly decked out and warm intimacy of Carter’s last resting place with his dirt-caked sneakers, seeing her at her most vulnerable and laid bare, eighty years of her life condensed and scattered across one room. Steve’s deathly still, near catatonic with sorrow. Sam’s rolled him onto his side so Steve doesn’t choke on his own spit, crying silently and steadily as he is, but Sam still feels useless and inadequate, carried back to all his fumbling attempts at soothing his inconsolable, wailing nephew. He’s no Alpha, he isn’t Tony fucking Stark, who can jerk Steve back to life or settle him into drowsy apathy with a palm on his nape — with a touch to his cheek, knuckles grazing.

Sam bends his knees and tries regardless: locks his arms around Steve, then suffers the indignity of damn near throwing his back out heaving the big lug up on the bed. He’d known Steve wouldn’t be as light as any of his petite ex-girlfriends, but to be fair, there’s more of Steve now than there used to be Before — Steve hasn’t exactly let himself go, but he’s been eating more than even his superhuman metabolism can keep up with, and most of the residue’s settled on his thighs and haunches. (Sam had asked Steve about it once, about three months into After, when he’d caught Steve’s gaze lingering just a beat too long on that pint-sized girl with the blonde pigtails and poor balance and blatant disregard for her spatial environment, blabbering nonsense in aisle seven. But Steve had only cracked that awful little half-smile, sad and wry, all downtrodden eyes and ridiculously long lashes, and that was that, Sam never brought it up again.) 

Sam pushes Steve’s bulk into the most comfortable, lived-in segment of the bed, swipes his phone from the nightstand. He sighs out loud and long-suffering to slow his pulse — a waste of time, it turns out, because Twitter’s crashed, and it kicks Sam’s heartbeat right up his throat and to his ears again. He mentally counts out five beats, then refreshes the website. 

Tony Stark is trending at seven million tweets.

See, Sam had thought he was done getting knocked on his ass by Stark. Man walks into a room and the fabric of reality unravels like a loose thread, remodulating into the kind of scientically dishonest extravaganza that would have Christopher Nolan wet his pants: floors tilting, lanky guys in straight-laced tuxes lifted off their feet to smack back-first into ceilings and remain awkwardly flailing and magnetically suspended like inverted turtles. All to sync with Stark’s freakshow of a brain, neurons firing at thousands times the standard rate, and everyone just rolls with it, content to be lagging, while Sam stubbornly anchors his feet to the ground, watches Steve turn soft and malleable as dough, random voices in ceilings start giving cheek, close-fisted surly politicians cheerily forking over deadline extensions and obscenely big rolls of cash, fake-tanned CEOs in checkered suits gnashing their teeth in sequestered corners.

Sam had kept his distance and a cool head, but there’s something to be said about failing to miss your target from an emotionally and physically removed vantage point. Stark’s like a goddamn rubber ball, if the rubber ball was infinitesimally small and packing enough momentum to flutter and blur. The moment you think you’ve closed your fist around the blunt weight, it slips through your fingers and bounces on — only Stark ain’t polite, so he leaps right out of your hand and wallops you square in the chest. Sam carried that bone-jarring repulsor blast with him all the way to Wakanda, and then the drenched scent of foreign air — cut grass, unexplored flora, herbs and ferns, rich earth in shadows, the element of wilderness — howled through him and carried it away. Sam waved it goodbye in glee, because how the hell did it matter, how could Stark even _compare_ to the most developed corner of the world tucked out of sight and right in the heart of the prejudicially believed underdeveloped piece of land on earth?

Sam had spent days walking on uncolonised African soil. He’d forgotten — that swoop of the guts, stepping a foot wrong and falling sideways down a sloping hill. Telling Steve his own damn Alpha was too wilfully shackled to swoop in and lift him bodily out of the constraints laid out by international law, then turning around to that same Alpha’s black, bulletproof eyes, rating Sam's new guilt-ridden and blue prison garb look through titanium bars. The irony ain’t lost on him.

Stark had made an effort, back then. His Omega had ran, and yet Stark's gaze didn't waver, his words vaguely benevolent, but there’d been a unsettling, hard edge to him that had Sam’s neck prickling warily, watchful and still whereas Stark settled his palm flush against clinically cold prison walls and leaned in. When Sam cracked with a helpless sigh and made Stark promise to go as a friend, Stark — to his credit — hadn't laughed himself sick and reminded Sam that Steve was bound to him, body and mind and soul. Instead he'd barely hesitated before offering Sam a reassuring, "Easy." Sam had looked at Stark, at the way he was cut through with a motionless, silent eagerness, and quietly wondered if Stark was aware that he looked to Sam less like an approachable, good-willed Alpha and more like an Alpha who’d scented blood and meant to track it to its source.

If that trail had led to anyone other than Steve, Sam wouldn't have relinquished their location. But it _had_ led to Steve, and the unwillingness to let any harm come to him had been coded into Stark's DNA. As far as Sam had been concerned, he’d saved Steve’s life.

But as he’d later come to realize, he’d also signed Barnes’ death warrant. Barnes, who’d left that bunker with a scorched stump where a vibranium arm should’ve been, who looked like he’d been drained of blood, all hollow-eyed and bone white and soaked through with cold sweat. Steve had spent the following nights curled up on Barnes’ chest, trembling his heartache away and looking sicker than all the widowed military spouses Sam has ever expressed his condolences to, every inch of him coated in Stark’s scent. Barnes slept with it in his nose, restless and fitful. Once Barnes had gone back on ice, Steve latched onto a blonde and bruised Natasha.

And now that it’s ten months later and Steve has clawed his way back to some semblance of a human being instead of traipsing about with a wide open, unnursed wound, now that he’s clumsily stitched himself back together with needle and thread and let the skin scar over — now, there’s this:

**@nytimes**  
Tony Stark’s “Extremis” serum not only rewrote his body’s cellular structure, granting him superhuman abilities such as enhanced strength and a regenerative healing factor — it also eradicated his Alpha gene

Tony Stark Rewrites His Body’s Cellular Structure — and Genetic Code — With “Extremis”  
🔗 nytimes.com  
♺47,7k ♡158,4k

Sam catches the curse that’s leapt to the fore of his mouth, but he can’t school his face: his jaw slackens and his eyes widen, trepidation settling in his gut like a stone when he realizes that he's wilting — shoulders sagging, spine curving into a slouch — in plain sight of Steve’s superhuman eyes. Any moment now, Steve’s going to ask questions, and Sam won’t be able to push an answer past the lump lodged in his throat.

He keeps scrolling through a procession of emotionally disconnected and opinionated tweets, because it’s all he can do, but his thumb’s gone so cold the touchscreen doesn’t always answer to his fingerprint, and so he’s stuck staring at some of them for far longer than he’d like.

**@gayjubliaees**  
tony stark may have won the war but he also won the divorce  
♺9,1k ♡28,6k

**@LESV0GUES**  
tony stark rewriting his body’s whole cellular structure purely to one-up his cheating ex is the pettiest power move i’ve ever witnessed in my entire goddamn life  
♺14,6k ♡54k

**@irasdee**  
why are y’all so shocked that tony stark did cap like that kdfjksdshs THIS BITCH HACKED AND EXPOSED THE GOVERNMENT DURING A LIVE SENATE HEARING PLS  
♺102,3k ♡365,7k

Sam’s accosted by animated GIFs of Stark blowing kisses after goading a sitting United States Senator and as of then undiscovered Hydra Agent into telling him to go fuck himself (on _live television_ ), bears witness to blue checkmark Twitter having a meltdown and concocting increasingly bleak and dystopian scenarios involving government-subsidized armies of enhanced soldiers (until some retired sitcom star turned political activist cuts in and alters the discourse by pointing out that they don't have to worry about the kind of paranoid and mistrustful son of a bitch who'd been trained to protect his thoughts from [_psychic mutant industrial spies_](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LxxXc.jpg), what the _fuck_ ), and accidentally exposes Captain America’s ears to what appears to be Nicki Minaj set to the backdrop of various snapshots of Stark at assorted red carpet events (liked and retweeted with six consecutive crying emojis by Nicki Minaj herself).

At which point Steve blessedly works up just enough willpower to rasp, "Sam," pulling him out of the gloating and out of touch hell-scape he'd compulsively descended deeper and deeper into, and then Steve rolls his disheveled head and his bloodshot, alarmingly vacant eyes towards Sam and says, "At least tell me he's not dead," and Sam doesn't know how to break it to him that Stark being dead might actually be the more favourable alternative to whatever the hell _this_ is. 

“He's not dead,” is what Sam settles on, after which his treacherous thumb promptly goes and sets off the open-mouthed, thin-browed white guy in what Sam now realizes is the thumbnail of either recently aired or soon-to-be-aired CNN footage.

_“The Washington Post recently published an article titled, quote, Tony Stark develops a cure for the Alpha gene, end quote, which incited some serious backlash and prompted Stark to respond and tell the Post to, quote, take that shit down, end quote, because he’d never actually described Extremis as a cure and he didn’t want the Post to ascribe that description to him. However,”_ now furrow-browed, increasingly blotched white guy presses onward, jabbing at empty air with a stylus, _“doesn’t this so-called Extremis serum — initially a virus, by the way — doesn’t it give rise to some pretty questionable — moral, existential — implications? If the arguably most powerful Alpha in the world feels the need to take an evolutional step forward, feels that the way towards improvement, towards betterment, involves doing away with his designation, what’s that say to the rest of us? What are the rest of us supposed to say?”_

Turns out Agitated White Guy had aimed that stylus and question at his co-correspondant, because the camera’s now focused on her bleached hair and her bleached teeth and her somewhat winded sigh. _“I mean, look, I don’t think it’s ever healthy or reasonable to compare—”_

_“Yes, I know, us mere mortals should never take Tony Stark as a measure for—”_

_“No,”_ she objects, and a spasm of annoyance flits across her face. _“What I mean is, this is just an extension of the way Stark operates now, isn’t it? The Sokovia Accords are all about superhuman regulation — Stark’s signed papers which postulate that special individuals need special guidelines so that the rest of the population — you called us mere mortals — can sleep well at night. We all know that whatever happened in Siberia — we don’t know what, but there’s ample evidence that suggests Rogers and Barnes were with him and that an altercation took place. Whatever it was, it haunts Stark to this day. Iron Man’s incredibly dangerous. If whoever operates him is blinded by his instincts—”_

_“You’re saying that’s what happened?”_

_“Come on, Chris. Everyone’s thinking it.”_

_“But I see what you’re saying,”_ Chris admits. _“Even though we’ve got confirmation that Barnes somehow miraculously made it out alive, Stark would still want to put himself in check. It’s his M.O.”_

But what about Steve, Sam wants to yell — and if Steve wasn’t so disconcertingly motionless and mute as if they’d only just rolled him out of the ice and were waiting for his blood to thaw, Sam would have buried his fist in the wall.

In the end it's Christine Everhart who throws Sam a bone: her Twitter profile links Sam to her exclusive Vanity Fair interview with Stark, and Sam’s fingers are clammy and shaky and swiping rapidly down the screen, and then he finally, _finally_ spots a reference to Steve.

Tony Stark and I go way back. It was my eyes he looked into when he proclaimed himself Iron Man during his historic press conference in 2008, my boldness he countered when I interrupted him mid-sentence and candidly questioned his carefully constructed cover-up story of an anonymous bodyguard operating the Iron Man armor in his stead. Nine years later, and Tony’s good looks haven’t deteriorated in the slightest, and he recognizes that same sly spark in my eye when I lean back and get ready to put forth my final question.

I ask him how Captain America, his former mate, factored into his decision to develop and implant Extremis, and Tony seems to consider the question carefully.

“I think we’ve all borne witness to how hard Cap fights for his freedom,” he tells me, as serious as I’ve ever heard him. “Let’s just say this is me, meeting him halfway.”


End file.
